For diagnostic purposes, the person who is diagnosing the problem, i.e., troubleshooter, may rely on indicators that have a fixed purpose. For example, for catastrophic problems that require immediate attention, such as, if a car's engine oil pressure is low, a single purpose “check oil” light on the dashboard turns on. Similarly, when a car door is ajar, there may be a special indicator on a liquid crystal display (LCD) or an audible message, notifying the driver to close the car door. Likewise, when the driver and/or passenger are not wearing their safety belt, an indicator on an LCD may light or an audible message may tell the driver that a safety belt is not properly on. These indicators' function cannot be modified to have a different function for troubleshooting purposes.
Non-catastrophic car problems often are difficult to troubleshoot. An indicator, such as the “check oil” light, may provide visible notification of a generic problem, but the computer error code that identifies the specific problem may be hidden under a car seat, carpeting, or in the trunk, and may not be visible while driving the car. For example, Honda provides a light emitting diode (LED) under the carpet on older models that flashes 1-20 times. If the error code is 92, there are nine flashes followed by two flashes. On newer models, the LED presents two digits. The error code appears to be a fixed function that indicates one error even when there may be multiple problems. Below are two examples of two Honda error codes, and a more comprehensive list is available at http://www.c-speedracing.com/faq/05.php
9196-98 CivicFuel Tank Pressure Sensor low input97-98 Prelude94+ Integra9296-98 CivicEvaporative Emission Control System insufficient97-98 CRVpurge flow96-98 Prelude94+ Integra
In addition, stored performance information from the car's computer may not be downloadable, or accessing thereof may require specialized equipment.
Hesitation is an example of a difficult car problem to troubleshoot. The difficulties arise as the troubleshooter attempts to correlate the time when the troubleshooter perceived the hesitation with the error codes stored in the car's computer log. Hesitation may happen regularly or intermittently, and may be due to various causes, such as, mechanical or electrical. To make matters worse, at the time of the perceived hesitation, the car's computer log may record an error code 138, but reset or overwrite the error code when the computer's log memory is full.
The car industry is not the only industry that uses indicators that are not multifunctional for troubleshooting purposes. Communication equipment, such as, routers, gateways, switches, and port boards within the equipment, etc., use LEDs to indicate the various states that the electronic product may enter and exit. For example, an electronic product may have several multi-colored LEDs. If a green LED is steadily on, then the product is operating normally. If a yellow LED is steadily on, the product may have experienced a problem. If a red LED is steadily on, then the electronic product may be off-line. Alternatively, a single LED may indicate a change in state by flashing on and off for a variable period. For example, the LED may be flashing on for a long period of time and off for a short period. Conversely, the LED may be flashing on for a short period and flashing off for a long period. These LEDs are visible and provide state information, but the troubleshooter cannot modify the LED's behavior to help the troubleshooter correlate the time when the troubleshooter notices a problem with an error logged by a computer.
Troubleshooting problems on communication equipment, and especially on a converged network, is difficult. A converged network's operation is complicated and includes specialized communication equipment providing voice communications over a packet network, such as, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). Specialized communication equipment may include call-processing stored program code and a VoIP interface board. The call-processing stored program code (i.e., software and firmware) completes transmission requests for voice, data, and video. The VoIP interface board converts media types, such as, analog or digital, to Internet Protocol (IP), thereby allowing conversations to occur between an analog phone and an Internet Protocol (IP) phone. In the communication equipment, call-processing stored program code and/or the VoIP interface board compute error codes for quality-of-service (QoS) faults. QoS faults include but are not limited to the following: loss of packets of data (packet loss); packet jitter (variation in time between data packets arriving, which may be due to network congestion, changes in packet routing, and timing issues); and out-of-order packets; etc. Packet loss and jitter are examples of two transient faults that cause voice impairments, drop fax and modem calls on converged networks, and disrupt telecommunications device for the deaf/telephone typewriter (TTY/TDD) calls.
The most troublesome faults are from outside of the boundaries of the enterprise network, and are outside of the enterprise's control, which leads to joint debugging sessions between multiple companies to solve a particular customer's problem. Packet loss due to network traffic may occur anywhere in the network path. Pinpointing the specific communication equipment that is causing the packet loss is often extremely difficult to determine in real-time by using current troubleshooting techniques. Current troubleshooting techniques include the following: using hardware or software based network sniffers; sending test packets between the near and far end of the call; performing dynamic calculations on the test packets between both ends of the call using the test data; and could include providing an endpoint with an audio or visible indication of the network QoS performance based on the dynamic calculations. Alternatively, the far end of the call can send a message to the near end of the call regarding the QoS of the call. The display can use the telephone's LED or other visible or audible means to convey the QoS information.
These troubleshooting techniques do not help correlate the customer's complaint or perceived problem, such as “I hear clicking on my phone calls,” with a recorded fault (ex. error code) in the error log. The troubleshooter will ask the customer what time did the clicking occur? The troubleshooter peruses the error log. Typically, there are many errors, and some time-stamps are not easily decipherable. Time-stamps are based on the communication equipment's clock, which may be incorrectly set to standard or daylight savings time. Alternatively, the clock may be synchronized to another clock, but has lost its synchronization. These problems make it difficult for the troubleshooter to correlate the time-stamp of the error in the error log with the time when the customer thought the transient problem occurred. Hence, the troubleshooter must wait for the problem to recur, and the cycle repeats.